Federal regulators are negotiating an agricultural water contract in the Central Valley, the latest of several dozen deals that could tie up water resources for the next 50 years. Thursday is the public's last day to comment on the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation's proposal to renew its long-term contract with Westlands Water District, which provides water to some 800 farms in Fresno and Kings counties.

Statement of Ken Cook, President, Environmental Working Group House Agriculture Chairman Collin Peterson, Ranking Member Bob Goodlatte, members of their committee, and their staffs, are to be commended for working long and hard to produce the Farm Bill passed by the House of Representatives today.

After 50 years of legal infighting, a victor has emerged in California's water wars -- agriculture. A decade after environmentalists prevailed in getting more fresh water down the north state's rivers and estuaries to improve fisheries and wildlife habitat, farmers are again triumphant. Central Valley irrigation districts are signing federal contracts that assure their farms ample water for the next 25 to 50 years.

Farm state senators, confronting an increasing struggle to win special disaster assistance for farmers, today will push for creation of a permanent disaster aid trust fund. The Senate Finance Committee will debate a new $6.1 billion trust fund that's been proposed by its chairman, Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont.

He was immortalized in Grant Wood's 1930 painting "American Gothic": a grim, hardscrabble stoic in overalls, grasping a pitchfork. Guess what? It wasn't really a farmer. It was Wood's dentist posing as a farmer.

Washington, D.C. - Some growers could get payments just to keep farming the way they already are, under changes being made to a House climate bill. Farm groups won provisions in the legislation that are intended to make it easier for farmers to qualify for a new carbon offset program that would be established by the bill.

Environmental Working Group is a research and advocacy nonprofit with considerable expertise in U.S. agriculture. We are perhaps best known in agriculture policy circles for our Farm Subsidy Database, which lists all the nation’s farm subsidy recipients and their share of the $165 billion taxpayers have spent on the programs since 1995.

A pending decision on the disposal of contaminated wastewater produced by San Joaquin Valley agriculture could have disastrous consequences for Bay Area drinking water, fisheries and wildlife, officials say.

Senate Democrats are about to renege on an earlier plan to give more money to programs that pay farmers and ranchers to protect wildlife habitat and water quality, a spokesman for the Environmental Working Group said Tuesday.

Traditional Favoritism to Agricultural Interests Is Challenged as Demand Increases

Washington Post, Juliet Eilperin

BIG SKY, Mont. -- A hundred years after the city of Los Angeles and San Fernando Valley farmers battled neighboring Owens Valley for control over water from the Owens River, there's a new kind of water war in the West. From Montana to Arizona to California and beyond, alliances of environmentalists, fishermen and city dwellers are challenging the West's traditional water barons -- farmers and ranchers -- who have long controlled the increasingly scarce resource.

How well a rewrite of an important federal law related to environmental uses of water is working was expected to be aired Friday, March 24, at a Central Valley workshop. The Water and Power Subcommittee was to examine the impacts of the 1992 Central Valley Project Improvement Act, which reallocated water from agricultural uses and reserved it for environmental purposes as well as setting up a fund to restore fish and wildlife.

An environmental watchdog group and a South Dakota outdoorsman slammed Congress Tuesday for proposing legislation that would purportedly slash millions from conservation programs in the recently adopted farm bill.

A handful of the Central Valley’s influential agricultural interests pleaded with a congressional panel to roll back portions of a 14-year-old federal law that elevated environmental uses of water to the same priority as crops. The law in question, known as the Central Valley Project Improvement Act, was amended in 1992 to give environmental uses of water more emphasis.